Async from scratch 3: Pinned against the wall
a year ago
- #Async
- #Rust
- #Pinning
- The article discusses the concept of pinning in Rust, particularly in the context of asynchronous programming and futures.
- It explains the difference between associated types and generics in traits, highlighting how associated types help with type inference and provide a single output type for a given base type.
- The article delves into the challenges of self-referential structs in Rust, demonstrating how raw pointers can lead to issues like dangling references and memory unsafety.
- It introduces the `Pin` type as a solution to safely handle self-referential data by restricting mutable access to prevent moving pinned data.
- The article explains the `Unpin` marker trait, which allows types to opt out of pinning constraints, and how Rust defaults to implementing `Unpin` for most types.
- It covers projection techniques for accessing fields of pinned structs safely, including manual projection methods and the use of the `pin-project` crate.
- The article provides a practical example of implementing a pinned future for a trick-or-treat scenario, showing how to manage self-referential data safely.
- It concludes by acknowledging the complexity of self-referential types and hints at future topics on running multiple futures concurrently.